It’s barely 8am and I’ve already had to restrain myself multiple times from getting into Twitter arguments with industry people who think that their idea of balance and how a game should be run is the only correct one...

Since these experts know best, they proclaim loudly that the people who made the product they don’t like must be incompetent fools who are overcharging for their work and ignoring playtest feedback. 1/

Here’s the thing about balance and designing for the average party, imo, based on my experience DMing for some wildly different groups of players with disparate levels of experience and approaches to character creation. (Read to the end before responding, pls.) 2/

Every level-appropriate combat encounter is deadly for a party of inexperienced players who aren’t optimized for combat, especially with a DM who IS experienced at playing smart enemies. 3/

Conversely, every level-appropriate combat encounter (in my experience) is ridiculously easy for a tactics-loving party with characters built to excel in combat. These are two extremes that I’ve seen in my not-even-that-extensive DMing experience. 4/

It’s good for designers to keep this stuff in mind, but we can’t “balance” an encounter to accommodate both extremes. Most designers assume that a character will have a +3 in their primary stat by Tier 2, but that’s not always the case. 5/

So, ideally we want to balance encounters around the median (50th percentile) party strength, assuming a reasonably experienced DM (?). In the two extremes I described above, it’s clear that the DM will have to adjust! 6/

We can’t balance every encounter at the 50th percentile, even without taking into account someone’s perception of what the median party strength is and what’s appropriate for the tone of the adventure. If we can land between the 30th-70th percentiles, that (to me) seems good. 7/

Here’s my not-so-secret take: every good DM is going to have to adjust encounters for the strength of the party, the tactics (or lack thereof) of the players, the environment, the resources expended.... To me, adjusting encounters is the norm, not a symptom of terrible design. 8/

I’m not saying that balance isn’t important—it is, and we should consider it as designers and DMs. But I think the expectation that every encounter be “balanced” (implication: perfectly balanced) is a) bullshit, and b) impossible. 9/

It’s valid to include questions of balance in critique of published work. But I will instantly lose respect for you if you assume that your notion of balance is the only correct one, and doubly so if you lambast others and are cruel in the way you critique their work. 10/

Finally, publicly making judgements about the competence of others will get you a lot of engagement on Twitter, but get you nowhere as a professional in a small industry. 11/11